using the chomp and split functions is fine for splitting records with 3 fields, but supposing you had 100 fields and you only wanted the 55th and 80th field values. there would be no real point in extracting all field values. Is there not a way to search/locate the nth delimeter ("|") and then extract the field directly following?

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other